Nintendos () prided itself for being a super energy-efficient console that ran nearly silent and sipped very little electricity. And although () was originally a loud monster with a penchant for Red-Ring-of-Death-ing itself, the amount of power it consumed was never as much as ()launch , which used more power than a refrigerator.Eurogamertook it upon itself to pit theagainst the Xbox 360 S and newand concluded thatnew console draws so little power in comparison to its rivals that its tiny casing still feels cool to the touch during intense gaming. Most impressive is that the Wii U maintains its low-wattage while fitting in a chassis thats smaller than both the Xbox 360 and PS3.

According toEurogamers tests, the Wii U draws only 32 watts of power during gameplay of games that are as graphically intensive as the 360 and PS3, with both consoles using 118% and 139$% more power, respectively.

To achieve such green levels, Nintendo clocks the Wii UsCPU to 1.24GHz and uses farfewer transistors than the competition. While there are still some mysteries as to how the hardware remains cool,Eurogamer also discovered that the AMD-built GPU increases performance by 40 per cent per square millimetre of silicon another big leap in efficiency.

Most disappointinginEurogamersanalysis is that they werent able to get the Wii Us wattage to spike more than 33 watts, suggesting that the console cant be over-clocked in the future to pump out more polygons.

If youre still on the fence on which console you should buy or play games on, the Wii U looks to be the one thatll keep your electric bill nice and low.